The second of our new role-based training classes focuses on replenishing your kanban system. We look at the risk management typically undertaken by product managers. Kanban offers very elegant solutions to the problems of large backlog management and prioritization. For anyone who has to decide what to work on now, what to leave until later and what to discard altogether, this is the class for you. If you want to understand how to select work for your kanban system, how to schedule it, how to sequence it and how to define classes of service to control the flow of work through the system, then this is the class for you. This class includes coverage of so called "upstream Kanban" and Real Option Theory. You'll learn to stop using the term "backlog" except for large projects with defined scope, and how to understand a "pool of ideas" as a set of options to be developed or discarded. You'll learn how to filter options based on risk assessment, how to hedge risk with capacity allocation, and how to schedule and select work, pulling it into the kanban system at the optimal time.

This new curriculum is scoped within the Modern Management Framework and will be available in 2-day class format at the Advanced Practitioner level with the LeanKanban University curriculum structure. Product Management for Kanban classes will be available publicly and privately from October 1st 2014 from David J. Anderson & Associates. From November 1st, and Accredited Advanced Kanban Trainer (AAKT) will be able to offer the class through the LeanKanban University certified training program.

This is my final blog post in the series on project management with Kanban. If you haven't seen the previous three posts read them here, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. This post looks at how project managers can help with risk management and controlling the average lead time and the the lead time distribution. This is important to insure that the forecasts described in Part 3 remain trustworthy and accurate through the duration of the project. The Blocker Clustering technique described in this post was developed by Klaus Leopold and can be used to drive process improvement as well as managing project risk. You can read his original blog post, Blocker Clusters.

I find that real life examples can help people understand why you can't talk about kanban systems without talking about risk, and why you can't calculate WIP limits without understanding work item types, risk and classes of service. Consider the humble problem of "how many shirts do you need hanging in your closet?"...

In China, "Kanban" simply means "looking at the board." For a Chinese audience, Kanban is encapsulated in the cartoon on the cover of my Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for your Technology Business. They don't need to look further than the characters standing in front of the board. Hence, to a Chinese mind, our management approach is centered around a standup meeting. All well and good and why not?

However, a senior executive at one of our clilents felt that this perception was likely to undermine the true value and the potential impact of our teachings on his business. So he suggested that we give the wider collection of ideas, intellectual property and teaching tools, a different name. It so happens I'd been thinking along similar lines and introducing terms and branding in our business to lay the foundation for this. So here it is, "The Modern Management Framework." This isn't new. It's the collection of our existing class curriculum and consulting tools but presented altogether in one place for the first time and under one banner.

In this second in my series of posts exploring project management with Kanban, I'd like to look at how we build a project schedule.

We prefer not to use the term "prioritization" with Kanban because prioritization isn't something done once or periodically leading to a prioritized list, instead prioritization is done dynamically each time an item is pulled through our kanban system. Prioritization isn't an activity in Kanban, it is a consequence of decisions made dynamically based on the risk profile of available work when a pull signal is generated in the kanban system.

I've listed a whole series of Kanban Coaching Professional (KCP) Masterclasses for the 2nd half of 2012. These classes are typically residential and can be consumed as 2 x 3-days or in a single 5-day week long intensive class. Typically 4 out of 5 people are choosing the 5-day version of the class since we introduced it at the beginning of 2014. These classes are a big commitment in time and money and we often get asked where the value is? I'd like to explain.